I am a freelance writer with a focus on the Ballard neighborhood. I love connecting what is happening in the community with my own life. I was born to be at large.

Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate..

Prizewinner of Sunset Hill

I learned yesterday that I won a neighborhood ice cream party for 100 people. I had entered my “350 words or less” on why my neighborhood deserved to win the Slow Churned Neighborhood Tribute. When I first told my daughter about the contest, she’d said, “this street would be perfect for that.” My mother, ever the contest queen, had forwarded the contest rules to me on-line.

My mother has always entered contests and to this day cannot walk past a cardboard box with a slot without volunteering personal information about herself in hopes of winning anything. But like that “Prizewinner of Defiance, Ohio” chronicled in Terry Ryan’s memoir, my mother was a winner. When my sister and I were growing up on the East Coast, my mother didn’t work, but in hindsight I see that as a member of several committees in the town government and as President of the League of Women Voters, my mother just wasn’t working for pay. So instead we reveled in the arrival of her winnings. The set of wine glasses, the copper Revere ware that she won for a chicken recipe. One of many things that made my mother stand out was her belief in the power of words, and proper postage. If her clothespins broke too easily she wrote the company and they mailed her an entire carton of new ones. When she forwarded me the ice cream contest, it was more fun to write 350 words on why I loved my block than to do my freelance work anyway.

I really do love this street. I grew up in a tight-knit community, where the older couples on their porches never let you forget that they remember you in diapers. On this block in Ballard, even without a prevalence of porches, there’s a sense of being home for life. Sure I may have laid on the rhetoric a little thick, but I stand by my words….

“The Edy’s Slow Churned Neighborhood Tribute would be a perfect reward to a street that first responded thirteen years ago to an anonymous 4th of July flyer asking them to move all of the cars and meet for a parade. The neighbors, young and old, childless or with newborns, emerged from their individual houses and everyone has stayed “out” ever since.”

Sometime in September the ice cream people will ship out a Party in a Box for 100, plus twelve cartons on dry ice. Since they didn’t mention toppings I may have to contribute the root beer so that we can make floats. I picture this happening on one of those evenings of seemingly endless light that we have late summer in Seattle, the kind of evening when the sidewalks stay warm and the cats lounge on the concrete. The kind of evening when it is too nice to go inside and couples sit together on their front steps and watch their children move dirt or draw with chalk.

It is just a block of houses, home to a variety of people with plenty of strengths and flaws, but it feels like home out on the sidewalk and not just inside my own walls. I’ll be scooping with pride in September because I won the real prize when I moved onto this block.

Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate..